Design Attitude

Definition

Design attitude is a stance toward business model innovation that embraces "messy, opportunistic bouncing back and forth" between market research, analysis, prototyping, and idea generation, rather than moving linearly from analysis to decision. The book contrasts it with "decision attitude," the traditional management posture that assumes generating alternatives is easy and choosing among them is hard. Citing Fred Collopy and Richard Boland, it inverts that assumption for genuinely novel problems: designing an outstanding alternative is the hard part, and once you have one, the choice becomes close to trivial.

In the Book

The chapter grounds the idea in Damien Newman's "Design Squiggle," a sketch depicting the design process as chaotic and uncertain at the outset, gradually resolving into a single point of clarity once the design has matured — visually the opposite of the tidy funnel that decision attitude implies. This directly motivates the book's five-phase Business Model Design Process (Mobilize, Understand, Design, Implement, Manage): the Understand and Design phases are explicitly described as proceeding "in parallel" rather than sequentially, with prototyping starting early, sometimes forcing a return to research when a prototype surfaces a gap the initial understanding phase missed.

Why It Matters

Decision attitude is the right tool when you're choosing among known options with known payoffs; design attitude is the right tool when the options themselves don't exist yet and have to be invented under real uncertainty. Recognizing which situation you're actually in — before reaching for a decision matrix versus a prototype — is a transferable diagnostic for any domain facing genuine novelty rather than a menu of pre-existing choices: product design, policy, research strategy, even personal decisions where the "options" haven't been generated yet.